Email marketing is an extremely effective way to connect with clients and potential clients. While you can spend most of your time crafting witty and click-through friendly subject lines, it is important to focus a bit of time on list hygiene.
Clean email lists are crucial to your email marketing success. If you don't delete inactive subscribers and addresses that continuously "bounce" your emails back, you risk sending your promotions straight to the spam box, or worse, your email address will be blocked entirely. Here’s what I recommend:
Increase your Email Deliverability
Your reputation with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will decrease as your delivery rate lowers. Periodically cleaning your lists to remove inactive subscribers or emails that are bouncing back will help to ensure that you are only sending emails to people who are likely to open them.
Protect Your Status
Undelivered emails and spam traps can do a number on your reputation as a sender. Think of it like a bad rumor spreading around about you in high school. If left unchecked, you'll be blocked from people’s inboxes.
This isn’t something that can just affect one email address. It can affect any email for a given domain.
Use List Cleaning Services
Most email marketing software includes some type of a list cleaning tool built-in. If they do not, then you can consider using 3rd party list cleaning tools. They will run through your existing email lists and tell you which emails are not good to keep on our list due to deliverability issues.
These are just a few basic steps you can take toward keeping your email lists clean and improving your deliverability rates. If you have more specific questions about email marketing, feel free to reach out.
Related Posts
Why Paying for Email Lists Is Costlier Than You Think
I'm sure majority of you receive your emails directly on your phones which is why it's that much more annoying to get unsolicited emails. Most people who receive spam do one of 3 things: delete it, unsubscribe, or report it as spam. Those that unsubscribe are also give the opportunity to mark the email as spam. So, if for some reason you are still purchasing lists in order to send unsolicited emails to people, that means 2/3 of their options involve marking you as spam!
Getting Started with Email Marketing Part 7: Tracking Your Success
You may have noticed that throughout this entire email marketing series I keep mentioning the importance of measuring your email campaigns. If you are spending time and money on any type of marketing, why wouldn't you make sure you are getting the best results?
Getting Started With Email Marketing Part 6: Scheduling Campaigns
Email marketing is similar to social media in that you should post at optimal times, and plan your content well-in-advance. Email campaigns need to be sent strategically to give your audience what they want and to get you the best return on your investment.